Google Ads Get Bigger
by Eric Norwood
October 6, 2009
Gartner, Inc. predicts that smartphone sales will increase by more than 25% this year, connecting more people than ever to a mobile web browser.
Google recently upped its iPhone advertising by inserting sponsored links into the Google Maps app, and yesterday they announced they would be "investing in new high-end mobile advertising products such as our search ad options for high-end phones and AdSense for mobile applications." Now Mobile AdSense publishers can chose to advertise on all cell phones with web browsing capability, or just the iPhone and other smartphones. Google is doing this "by introducing a new JavaScript snippet that... offers publishers the ability to run larger AdSense ads visible on high-end phones. We'll automatically detect if the user is browsing with a high-end phone, and instead of serving a smaller mobile WAP ad, we'll return a larger ad optimized for high-end mobile devices."High-end phone owners will automatically see the bigger ads, whether or not the publisher has targeted them specifically, and publishers do not need to update their websites for the larger ads to appear.
This is really just more evidence for how valuable iPhone screen real estate is to advertisers. It will be interesting to see just how big these ads are going to get.
